Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

“The more peo­ple know about how the sys­tem of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment real­ly works, the less sup­port they will have for that pol­i­cy,” says Marc Bookman, the author of A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays. Bookman’s crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed col­lec­tion of essays — described by Publishers Weekly as ​“a cogent and har­row­ing primer on what’s wrong with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment” — chan­nels his decades of cap­i­tal lit­i­ga­tion experience into…

In a mem­o­ran­dum that left to Congress the task of address­ing sys­temic ques­tions of arbi­trari­ness, racial dis­crim­i­na­tion, and wrong­ful con­vic­tions affect­ing the admin­is­tra­tion of the fed­er­al death penal­ty, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland (pic­tured) issued a direc­tive for­mal­ly paus­ing fed­er­al exe­cu­tions while the Department of Justice (DOJ) under­takes a review of exec­u­tive branch poli­cies adopt­ed in the last two years of the Trump…

The first half of 2021 spot­light­ed two con­tin­u­ing death-penal­­ty trends in the United States, accord­ing to the Death Penalty Information Center’s 2021 Mid-Year Review. On one hand, the con­tin­u­ing ero­sion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in law and prac­tice across the coun­try; on the oth­er hand, the extreme and often law­less con­duct of the few juris­dic­tions that have attempt­ed to car­ry out exe­cu­tions this year. The year began with three exe­cu­tions that con­clud­ed the Trump administration’s unparalleled…

Texas exe­cut­ed John Hummel on June 30, 2021, an hon­or­ably dis­charged for­mer Marine with ser­vice-relat­ed trau­ma whose tri­al lawyer now works for the pros­e­cu­tor who was try­ing to execute…

For the sec­ond time in three years, the Nevada Department of Corrections (NDOC) and the state of Nevada are fac­ing legal action from a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal man­u­fac­tur­er after obtain­ing drugs for an exe­cu­tion in vio­la­tion of the drug manufacturer’s…

Three quar­ters of Dallas, Texas vot­ers say they pre­fer some ver­sion of life impris­on­ment over the death penal­ty for peo­ple con­vict­ed of first-degree mur­der, a new poll has…

The num­ber of pris­on­ers on death row across the United States con­tin­ues to decline while the aver­age amount of time they have been on death row approach­es 19 years, accord­ing to a new report from the Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics…

An Ohio tri­al court has resen­tenced death-row pris­on­er David Braden (pic­tured) to life with­out parole, mak­ing him the first per­son in the nation tak­en off death row by a state law bar­ring cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment for peo­ple with severe mental…

Following addi­tion­al rev­e­la­tions that Richard Glossip (pic­tured) may be inno­cent of the mur­der that sent him to Oklahoma​’s death row in 1998, a bipar­ti­san group of 34 state leg­is­la­tors are call­ing upon Governor Kevin Stitt and the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board to con­duct an inde­pen­dent inves­ti­ga­tion into Glossip’s…

Unheard voic­es from death row come to life in the new book, Right Here, Right Now: Life Stories from America’s Death Row. The book, a col­lab­o­ra­tive project between the arts col­lec­tive Hidden Voices and more than 100 men on death rows across the United States, the­mat­i­cal­ly weaves togeth­er their per­son­al nar­ra­tives to cre­ate a com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture of who is on death row, how they got there, what they expe­ri­ence, and why their lives…